Open book testing for on-boarding new starters

Over the last year, we’ve recruited 13 user testers into the CJS Common Platform Programme (CPP). Over that time, we’ve experimented with a number of on-boarding processes, with varying results.

We needed to get people up to speed quickly about the technologies that we’re using, the application that we’re building and the domain language and context that goes with them.

We have an induction programme that includes an introduction to CPP but lacked the detail to get people ready to contribute to our delivery functions.

We have 3 new starters over the coming weeks and we’re rapidly approaching our first public release - there’s a lot to do. Realistically, we have a big challenge to reduce the on-boarding time from when someone joins, to them contributing to delivery activities.

Brain dumps can be unexciting and there’s only so much you can learn from watching someone else work. Asking someone to get up to speed by reading our internal wiki has limited benefits and it can often be difficult to digest and retain that much information.

We wanted to come up a more engaging way to do this. The Common Platform is an innovative, complex and inspiring programme for change. The introduction for a new starter should reflect that.

So, we are going to try Open Book Testing.

What is Open Book Testing

It’s essentially the same concept as an open book exam; except in our context, the book is the system, product or service that we’re testing.

This is a technique that was developed by Context-Driven-Testing (something that we find extremely useful on the Common Platform). The technique will see a collection of questions, defined by existing service and product experts or other testers, presented to new starters.

The objective is that new starters learn the product and service by exploring and using the application to answer the questions. During this process, testers take notes on what they find.

The outcome should be that the new starter learns about the product and the leadership team learns about how the new starter approaches testing. The new recruit has an opportunity to present findings and compare results with the rest of the team and the system gets a fresh set of eyes over it.

Over the next few weeks, our new starters will go through this process and we’ll publish their experiences as a follow up to this post.